Chapter 497: Terror! III
The glorious, terrible battle raged across this section of Star Sea Gamma-7, a symphony of destruction played out grandly!
Achilles’s sudden, silent massacre had sent a dissonant chord through the Nar’Thyss’s carefully composed Fable of invasion.
Across the void, Mor’dantius the Harvest King observed the anomaly. The casual arrogance that had defined his presence curdled into something sharper.
He had been enjoying his duel with the Titan-Primus, a satisfying clash of Tier 9 existences that was generating a delightful vintage of narrative tension.
But this... this was an unplanned edit, a scrawl in the margins of his masterpiece.
With a harrumph that made space itself grumble in deference, he began to move, intending to personally erase the misbehaving character who was killing so many of his forces.
But...
Titan-Primus Shal’garon illuminated with the brilliance of a star deciding to be born. His diamond-pure form blazed, and a harmonic wave of pure authority slammed into Mor’dantius, halting his advance.
"Outsider!" Shal’garon’s voice boomed, a chord of law that resonated through dimensions!
"You will not advance anywhere! Your battle is with me! Come!"
...!
Achilles watched this exchange with the cold appreciation of a grandmaster observing a predictable gambit.
The two Tier 9 entities were now locked, each a gravitational anchor holding the other in place!
This was the opening he had foreseen. He took in the scope of the battle, his perception a weaving of interwoven narratives.
And in that weaving, he saw a new thread of concentrated malice being woven toward him.
The vast majority of the remaining Tier 8 and Tier 7 Nar’Thyss, the lieutenants and commanders of the Scourge, now turned their multifaceted eyes towards him.
Their movement was a ripple of murderous intent spreading through the legion.
From the heart of the clashing titans, Mor’dantius’s voice erupted, a narrative decree that carried the weight of a death sentence.
"That anomaly! Wipe it out! Erase its Fable from existence!"
Achilles felt a cold thrill. This was the test. Not the lumbering Tier 9s, but their swarm.
He wanted to see how his new authorities held up against numbers, against the coordinated onslaught of beings who were, by any conventional measure, titans in their own right!
HUUM!
The Nar’Thyss surged.
It was a beautiful, horrifying sight. A tidal wave of shimmering wings and narrative malice, hundreds of Tier 8 and Tier 7 existences converging on his position from every conceivable vector.
They were not a silent horde; they were a choir of damnation!
"The Harvest King has judged you! Your Fable is forfeit!" a Tier 8 roared, its twelve pairs of wings beating a rhythm that warped space.
"Cease your dissonant noise, aberration! Your story ends here!" shrieked another, unleashing a torrent of corrupted, obsidian Scourge.
They came at him, a storm of endings, a legion of living plot twists designed to kill.
Achilles met their charge with a terrible calm.
He raised a single crystalline hand. Around it, the obsidian orbs of nothingness multiplied, each one a hungry mouth in the fabric of reality.
BOOM!
The first wave of Nar’Thyss, a dozen Tier 7 commanders, crashed into a defensive sphere of his Void Orbs. There was no explosion. No clash of energies.
They simply... stopped. Their roars of narrative decree were silenced mid-syllable. Their bodies, their Fables, their very meaning, were unwritten as they touched the absolute negation of the Void. They dissolved into motes of forgotten story.
"What is this blasphemy?!" a surviving Nar’Thyss screamed in existential terror.
Achilles took a single step.
The Regulation of Quantum answered his will. He did not move through space; he simply ceased to be in one location and began to be in another.
He appeared behind a squadron of Tier 8 elites who were preparing a complex narrative curse.
They turned, their many eyes wide with a shock that transcended thought. But he was already among them, the orbs of nothingness held in his hands like a predator’s claws. He didn’t strike. He merely touched!
A touch to a wing, and the wing was gone, not severed but erased. A touch to a body, and a perfect sphere of absence appeared where living narrative had been.
He moved through their formation like a phantom, an editor deleting sentences, then paragraphs, then entire Chapters. Their screams were not of pain, but of confusion, the sound of stories falling apart!
"It... it negates our authority!" one gasped, its form flickering as its Fable destabilized.
"Retreat! Fall back!" another shrieked, but there was nowhere to run!
Achilles took another quantum step, appearing in the very center of their panicked retreat. He opened his hands, and the orbs of nothingness swirled outward in an expanding spiral of annihilation.
It was a ballet of brutality, a surgical strike against the very concept of their existence. The terror he spread was more profound than simple fear of death! It was the fear of being forgotten, of having never mattered at all.
The Nar’Thyss, beings who fed on the drama of others, were now the protagonists in a minimalist horror story with only one possible ending: deletion.
The tide broke.
The confident legion, the weavers of tragedy, turned and fled. Their elegant forms scrambled through space, wings beating in a panicked rhythm that was pure, unadulterated terror.
They no longer roared threats; they shrieked for survival, abandoning their formations, their pride, their very purpose, to escape the walking void that had appeared in their midst.
Mor’dantius felt their terror, their narrative collapse, and his rage reached a level that was, in itself, a cosmic event.
He roared, a sound of pure fury that made the very stars of Gamma-7 tremble.
"ENOUGH!"
Silver stellar authority erupted from his being. It was not a beam or a wave. It was an expansion.
His Existential Authority of Fables, the full, terrible weight of his Tier 9 narrative might, began to swirl and expand like a decree. It washed over the battlefield, a silver tide that covered the entire region for light-years in every direction!
HUUM!
The very fabric of the conflict became his personal manuscript, every being within it...Titan, Nar’Thyss, Achilles...a character he could now directly control and unmake at will.
It was the ultimate expression of a Nar’Thyss’s power, a story so grand it consumed all lesser stories.
And it was exactly what Achilles had been waiting for.
As the silver light of Mor’dantius’s Fable washed over him, a brilliant, terrible smile bloomed on his crystalline face.
He looked out across the now-silvered battlefield, toward the arrogant butterfly who had just laid his entire soul bare.
He called out lightly, his voice a calm, impossibly clear note in the symphony of chaos.
"My Little Phoenix, burn him up."
...!
A light call. A promise of annihilation.
And silently, from her veiled spot a universe away in his perception, Rose, the Primordial Genome Empress, smiled!
She had been watching, waiting. As Mor’dantius’s narrative authority spread across the stars, making himself maximally open, maximally vulnerable, she tapped a single crystalline finger into the void.
From that touch, a poison born of rewritten biology and narrative venom...a toxin designed to bind to the very genome of the Nar’Thyss...was released. It was a story of sickness, a Fable of decay, and it had just found its protagonist!
Oh!